Many news outlets have recently reported that the AI hype train is stuttering. Why? Perhaps because it is no longer driven forward by vague prophecies; AI adoption is widespread.
Yet, the success of AI within customer journeys varies. Headlines including: “Why Most Companies Are Failing at Artificial Intelligence” and “Why Your AI Project Is Failing to Deliver Value” are in no short supply.
Harvard Business Review draws the conclusion that: “Ambitious moon shots are less likely to be successful than “low-hanging fruit” projects that enhance business processes.”
Fortunately, there are many low-hanging fruit use cases where AI is excelling in the contact centre. These tend to fit into three distinct categories: automation, intelligence, and coaching.
Automation
Contact centres harness automation to remove and simplify conversations. In doing so, they improve CX by streamlining customer journeys and lowering effort.
To remove calls, many companies turn to chatbots, exploiting the power of AI. Unfortunately, early adopters of such technologies uncovered many pitfalls. These include:
- Building one bot to answer numerous queries. The best bots are narrow and deep
- Attempting to automate overly complex contact reasons, which are impossible to encode
- Selecting solutions with little AI, which hinge on frail scripting
Luckily, the technology is improving. Leading vendors offer bots that assess a constant stream of live conversations to self-learn. RingCentral is one such vendor, righting the wrongs of older bots that drive customer frustration. To do so, they run a “Bring Your Own Bot” campaign.
Introducing this initiative, Gayathri Krishnamurthy, Associate Vice President of Product Marketing at RingCentral, says:
“For businesses that have already invested a bot, it’s possible to integrate that into the RingCentral contact centre. Doing so bridges channels, feeds the bot with better data, and delivers enhanced CX”
In terms of automation to simplify contacts, consider which common queries drive long handling times. Then, examine the path to resolution. Which manual processes prolong CX?
For starters, consider identification and verification (ID&V) procedures. Often cumbersome, a biometrics system can automate these completely.
Yet, to grab hold of the low hanging fruit, consider how often agents follow the practices below. Each of these is relatively easy to automate.
- Opening programmes
- Logging into applications
- Copying and pasting information
- Locating relevant information
- Auto-filling forms (inc. After Call Work)
- Calculating figures
If contact centres assess their top 10-20 contact reasons, they will uncover lots of these little automation opportunities. By building them into a business case, they can drive significant savings while boosting the service experience for customers and agents.
Intelligence
AI technologies increase contact centre intelligence through capturing and analysing interaction data. For example, AI-infused speech analytics is a powerful solution for root cause analysis. Operations may then uncover critical customer pain points and act to improve CX.
Yet, the design of many AI tools now centres primarily on building agent intelligence. Such a trend runs in parallel with the growth of chatbots and self-service solutions swallowing up simple, transactional contacts. The result is that agents will soon face a barrage of complex, emotive conversations.